raddevon

A late-morning play session had Tiffany and I uncovering our second monolith and completing more of the main quest. The monoliths, when activated, allow the player to teleport around the map. This is a great convenience although the spacing of these monoliths is a little odd. In the small portion of the overall map I have examined, I can see two monoliths seemingly within a hundred feet or so whereas most others are spaced a mile or more apart. Of course, as I mentioned previously in my discussion of pathfinding, the two that seem to be very near may only be so as the bird flies and may instead be separated by miles of walking around rocks, trees, and the like.

I honestly do not know what is happening in the main quest. I have fallen into the WoW circle of get quest, proceed to objective, rinse and repeat. I don't feel I'm missing much. The story seems a bit trite. Luckily, the game is enjoyable enough to overcome anything it lacks in gripping story.

This is the first play session for which I have wished for some sort of button to exit dungeons. It is very easy to enter and leave dungeons without ever intending to do so although a button for entrance and exit could cause its own set of problems given that every button on the controller is already mapped to some other action.

I have become slightly overwhelmed with my combat arts. I'm sure this will pass with time, but, at the moment, I have a couple of combat arts at any given time that I cannot for the life of me remember their functions. Also, at this early stage in the game, it seems I will not be able to have easy access to all of my combat arts as I progress through the game. Out of the three available spell/ability banks, I have one full and three in another leaving only four empty slots total for future expansion. I assume I will have to concentrate on a particular set of spells. I'm not sure how this will work out because it seems that using one spell from a set starts the cooldown for all others in that set meaning that I cannot use any others from that set for a short time. I'm sure this will come with time.

Going back to a theme from the first part of this series of posts, I have obtained and completed a number of quests called "Tutorial" quests, but they all seem rather light on the tutorial aspect of the quest. It is more accurately an unlocking quest in that I complete a typical quest and then gain access to a new NPC with a very brief explanation of how to use him or her.

I have mastered the art of dying... or rather the art of damage control after the death of either myself or Tiffany. If we both die, we respawn at the nearest monolith, but, if either of us dies and the other survives long enough, the dead player will respawn right on screen with a full health bar and, as far as I can tell, no death penalties. The aforementioned spacing of monoliths can lead to quite a bit of frustration in the event of frequent deaths. Neither of us enjoy trekking back to our current quest having respawned miles away. Now, we know we can just run around in circles when the other dies to insure the survival of the party as a whole.

We have encountered a couple of annoying bugs. The first was a bug I commented on in the previous post, but I was unsure at that point whether it was a bug or simply a poor design choice. A failed quest was still listed with new tasks after our having failed it but with no way to set it as the active quest leaving us puzzled as to where to go next. Upon loading up our save game today, the quest was once again grouped with the rest of our quests, and we were able to set it as active. This allowed us the pleasure of returning to the dead soldiers lieutenant to have him inform us that we were useless. The other bug was encountered frequently on resurrection from death of one of us: the resurrected party is sometimes unable to move! We were able to remedy this by having the other player move in close and initiate a trade then immediately cancel it. Once this had taken place, both players moved as normal.

I have begun reaching the point at which my Inquisitor can no longer be used as the melee class I was forced into at the start due to a lack of offensive spells or ranged weaponry. I still do a large percentage of my damage via melee combat, but my character is quickly learning combat arts that will allow me to back out of the fray and leave that duty to my wife's Dryad since she is much more hearty.

If you are reading this and wondering to yourself, "Who is this jerk to tell me what he thinks he knows about a game he has now played for maybe two hours?" I have good news for you, friends. According to Sacred 2, having reached level 5 with my character, I am now "Reputable." Yes, that's right. I have unlocked the "Reputable" achievement. As I see it, this is roughly equivalent to having graduated from developmental preschool so you no longer need worry about the accuracy or validity of the statements made herein.

That's all for now. So, until next time, happy adventuring!

My wife Tiffany and I just tonight began our crawl through Sacred 2--a game not without a learning curve but lacking quite a lot in the way of a tutorial. The game was originally released on the PC, but we are playing on the Xbox 360 port of the game. After the opening cinema, the player is thrust into the action with little explanation. I plan to outline some of my difficulties in the game, tell if and how I overcame them, and give some impressions. This is part review (albeit with only about an hour of playtime), part introduction to the conventions of the game.

I started a campaign of shadow. Right after my character hit the game world, Tiffany hit start on her controller. I had the luxury of the "full" character creation which allowed me to really take my time choosing my class and God. She had not yet created a character so she was forced through a sparse character creation upon joining. It also seemed that I could not attack while her character creation was taking place. Luckily, the enemies that had begun attacking me retreated after getting a few cheap shots. I had chosen the Inquisitor which is a shadow-only class. This forced Tiffany to also take the shadow path for her chosen class. I had wondered how the game might handle this. I assume it would be impossible to co-op the Inquisitor with the Seraphim which is a class that can only choose the light path.

The game did not explicitly tell me where to go. The mini-map displays a golden arrow pointing toward the objective of your main quest although this is never stated in-game. A more careful exploration of the instruction manual beforehand would have revealed this, but I have been spoiled by many modern games that would spell this out in-game instead.

The game's menus are deep for a console game. This game was obviously conceived as a PC game, and this port is not at all dumbed down from that which makes navigating a bit cumbersome. I will say, though, that expansive menus have been ported over in the best way possible. It may take players an hour or so to become acclimated, but the depth afforded them by this concession is considerable.

After realizing that the Back button summons the map, I figured out the location of the objective for my main quest and started heading in that direction. Along the way, I fought a few enemies--usually no more than two at a time--and even gained a level. The game informs the player that there are attribute points to spend, and a quick trip to the menu screen allows the user to assign the point with ease. However, I don't remember being told that I also had skill points that could be used as well.

It is often difficult to find a path to your destination even though the map reveals it to only be a few feet away. It may be at a lower or higher elevation, or it might be obscured by some obstacle. Sometimes, you have to make quite a trek to get to a point that is actually very close because you have to find a path that will actually get you there. It makes me appreciate the intent of Fallout 3's map system in which you are provided with a path that will theoretically get you to your current waypoint. Actually, this game could stand to borrow a couple of things from the Fallout 3 map... like waypoints in general.

I took a quest which asked that I take an NPC into battle with me to free some of his friends. Our entire party died in the process leaving the quest with an "X" next to it in my quest guide. The guide stated that the NPC had been kiiled and that I should report this to his Lieutenant. I cannot make this the active quest, I assume, because it was failed, but I have no idea how to get to his Lieutenant to report his death. I assume this quest is stuck in purgatory until I happen to stumble across the fellow.

A strange thing happened on our first trip into a dungeon. We passed a certain point and were told to find a magical hiding place. We began hitting the nearby walls thinking we might open a passage of some sort before deciding to give up and move on. As we proceeded down the corridor, text was displayed on the screen labeling the magical hiding place in a fashion similar to the game's labels of loot as if we had just picked up the magical hiding place. I still don't understand what happened. Did we find it?

Picking up loot is oddly a mystery. Loot will sometimes drop that I cannot pick up by passing over it. In these instances, my wife can usually pick up the loot. I assume this is the game's way of preventing either of us from loot-hogging. The most puzzling thing is that, in some cases, passing over this loot pops up a message that the loot is reserved with a countdown to the time when it is no longer reserved. In most cases, this never occurs. I instead receive no feedback as to why I cannot pick up the item.

Although this may seem like a giant bitch-session, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. This is a rare modern game that leaves much of the game a mystery opting instead to allow (or force, depending on your perspective) the player to learn by doing and by--gasp!--reading the manual! I'm sure I will be giving this game much more playtime as it is a rare game that both Tiffany and I enjoy playing together. I plan to continue these posts outlining aspects of the game that perplex me as well as general observations. I hope you enjoy the posts!

Long live point-and-click. Now all we need is keyboard and mouse support on the 360.